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:: Friday, September 28, 2007 ::

Blade Runner SE

Gearing up for the special edition directors cut Wired have this Q&A:
Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined
via null device, who also pulls some pullquotes out of it:

J. Craig Venter
Geneticist
"The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that people want a slave class. As I imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, I think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? But people ask me whether I could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. I've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their cell. I don't see us, as a society, doing that."

Doesn't this miss the entire point of the story. I don't think Dick ever intended any of his novels to be accurate representation of the future. He only wrote science-fiction because it was the only medium through which he could get his ideas published. The story is actually about the philosophical arguments about what is human.

From wikipedia:
Dick's inspiration for the central plot point involving androids which are indistinguishable from humans came from specific factors in his own life experience. First and foremost, he could not accept that the people who committed atrocities such as the Holocaust during World War II were truly human. He felt that they must be inhuman monsters who merely appeared to be human. While this was initially a figurative philosophical concept, Dick was a user of amphetamine, which he used to fuel his writing. As a result, he developed a high level of paranoia, and his notion about people appearing to be human when they were not became more literal.[citation needed]

Admittedly this is exactly the type of uncited reference that makes wikipedia unreliable, but having read it matches my understanding of it of the point he was trying to make.

Sci-Fi that tries to accurately predict the future is often boring. [cf. most Arthur C. Clark] Sci-Fi that asks 'what if?' is what is really interesting. The what if doesn’t have to be plausible, it's just a platform. It allows analysis of current thinking, be it scientific, philosophical, political, religious etc, from an outsiders point of view. That’s what makes it interesting as a medium.

Labels: Film, Literature, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 28.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post]    ::
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